Gay kids aren’t a “plot point” that you can play with. Gay kids are real, actual kids, teenagers, growing up into awesome adults, and they don’t have the books they need to reflect that. Growing up, my nose was constantly stuck in a book. Gro...
If someone were to autopsy her heart, they'd find traces of life, evidence of eons gone by. Times when she'd been able to feel and the feelings left imprints. Maybe her heart was wearing a cast. Maybe it wasn't sclerosed at all but atrophied, shrunke...
Listen, I've always been a situational writer. My idea of what to do with a plot is to shoot it before it can breed. It's true that when I start a story, I usually have a general idea of where it's going to finish up, but in many cases I end up in a ...
For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexico...
Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized furt...
I was walking around in an almost blind, crazy rage of madness. There was a story burning a hole in my brain, and it was dying to come out on paper. It was begging of me to create it, but I didn’t know where to begin. A month after giving birth to ...
She didn't do anything at all except arrived without warning in the middle of the night (right when I least expected it) She walked by me, with a strut in her step smelling like summer causing me to turn my head (even the leaves swayed her way) All s...
This American system of ours', he shouted, 'call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if only we seize it with both hands, and make the most of it'. A month later in New York...
I lit a fire and sat there in my rocking chair. We lit a candle for him. It was as simple as that. I knew that what I had done may have been a catalyst in Danny's death, but I also knew that there was really nothing else I could have done. I can neve...
Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and ...
Do not limit yourself to your own preconceptions of yourself, but throw yourself out onto a blank page that you haven't written on yet, and see what you find out about you, see what story unfolds, see what happens! I always do this, and sometimes it ...
There is a single truth, it filters through different stories and languages because people come from different cultures and speak different languages. And this truth has manifested itself through millennia, in multiple ways. Different people belong t...
What marvelous things happen when men and women walk with faith in obedience to that which is required of them! I recall reading the story of Commander William Robert Anderson, the naval officer who took the submarine Nautilus beneath the polar ice f...
Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and most of these dogmas have been false. Al...
Amo gli occhi di una donna, la sua pelle, la sua passione, tutto. Parlo tanto, fin troppo, ma ci sono momenti che rimango in silenzio ad ascoltarmi. E’ in quei momenti che fabbrico i miei pensieri più veri, mentre cammino per le strade, osservando...
Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief ...
I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an ar...
My fight isn’t so simple, it has very deep roots, from long ago, from earlier generations. Life weighs on me with the weight of my family history, my genes drag along a race of sons of plenty and sons of bitches who with a blade of a machete cleare...
Charlie Chaplin: That's not what dogged me, George. It wasn't that. Charlie Chaplin: It was... it was the knowledge that if you did what I did for a living-if you were a clown-and you had a passion to tell a particular kind of story... something... b...
[in a Chinese restaurant] Waiter #1, Waiter #2, Waiter #3: [singing] Deck the harrs with boughs of horry, fa ra ra ra ra, ra ra ra ra. Chop Suey Palace Owner: No, no, not 'ra ra ra ra', 'la la la la'! Try again. Waiter #1, Waiter #2, Waiter #3: D...
[Ralphie is visiting Santa at the department store, only he can't remember what he wanted] Santa Claus: How about a nice football? Ralphie as Adult: [narrating] Football? Football? What's a football? With unconscious will my voice squeaked out 'footb...
